In this talk, Vishal Jugdeo situates his research in Guyana and India with a discussion about the usefulness and limits of quasi-ethnographic cinema practice, a trend in recent contemporary art. Drawing from a range of references in popular culture, experimental documentary, and historical “cinema verite,” Jugdeo posits the notion of the “diasporic gaze” as one that complicates the vantage point from which one looks from outside. A project titled VQUEERAM (2016 - ongoing) from which Jugdeo will present a series of excerpts, investigates queer friendship and other non-traditional familial structures, considering how the relation between filmmaker and subject might oscillate between intimacy and distance.

Vishal Jugdeo is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, installation, performance and sculpture to construct experimental approaches to narrative. Weaving together strategies from television, documentary and narrative cinema, as well as theater, he emphasizes the physical and psychical space around moving images. He has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at the ICA Philadelphia, LAXART, Los Angeles, Western Front, Vancouver and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica. Major commissioned works have been featured in Performa, New York, Made in LA at the Hammer Museum Los Angeles and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Notable group exhibitions include Witte De With Center for Contemporary Arts, Rotterdam, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, INOVA, Milwaukee and Vox Populi, Philadelphia. 

Jugdeo completed an MFA at UCLA, and a BFA at Simon Fraser University. He is a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and has received grants from Art Matters, Artadia, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, California Community Foundation, and the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as residencies at Skowhegan, BOFFO and the MacDowell Colony. Jugdeo has taught extensively at Cooper Union, Parsons School of Art and Design, California State University Long Beach, USC and UCLA.

MFA, University of California, Los Angeles